I finally received my new digitizer from pdaparts.com, and went on to replace my trusty Palm TX’s digitizer that was failing in very bad ways. I don’t have pictures of the procedure, since I was very busy sweating and being overall worried about my beloved Palm.

But here she is, fully recovered:

The glass digitizer that i bought is actually better than the one that came with the palm from the factory (which was plastic, the new one is glass baby), i can now use the Notepad app and have my terrible handwriting somewhat easier to understand:

Many of you will ask:

“Why didn’t you take it somewhere to get it repaired?”

“Did you lose your warranty?”

“Are you crazy?”

Of course, the answer to number 3 is: “YES!”, number 2 is: “What warranty? Do people in DR understand such a concept?” and number 1 can be answered as:

Do you really think i’m gonna place my favorite gadget in the hands of a monkey from some repairing place in order for him to charge me a whole lot of money and not solve my problem or make it worse??

Taking important stuff to a repairshop in this country is like trying to solve a crossword puzzle with a hammer… you can try, but it’s not very efficient and you can destroy the puzzle if you do it wrong. They don’t even bother disassembling the device to actually check what’s wrong, they just name the same problem you told them you have and charge you. Then they tell you to leave the device and come back in 1-2 weeks.

You wait the 2 weeks, and then call. They tell you that Pedrito (the technician) is not there and will not be there until [insert hour of the day after 6pm], and that you will need to wait for tomorrow. You say “ok”, and then wait another long day. Rinse and repeat for 2-3 times, depending on the person. When you finally manage to hunt Pedrito down, he will tell you that he hasn’t been able to look at the problem yet, but that he is “working hard” on resolving it.

Now you have 2 choices:

You blow up and take your device from the store, pay any charges for [null] work. Then repeat the process at another repairshop.

You wait until Pedrito decides to solve your problem.

Now, if your problem is simple enough, Pedrito may be able to solve it. He may replace some pieces of the thing you are fixing. Don’t ever ask to see the original pieces he replaced. It will piss Pedrito off and will likely keep you waiting some more hours while Pedrito dissassembles another machine in order to show you how bad the pieces were (he probably took out some other perfectly working pieces of your device without telling you, in order to scam another customer).

Now you pay [insert a huge undeserved amount of money] and get out for the store. Your device may work for more than a week, or… not. Then you repeat the cycle again and again, and again… until you buy another device and it breaks down again.

THAT is why you never see me going to repairshops or the like. This turns me into a DIY kind of guy, since i prefer to do these kinds of things myself or ask my father for help, as he has a similar obsession. I have never had a problem or new expensive paperweights so far.

For good measure, here is my Palm doing what you Zune users should have been able to do a long, long time ago and me playing Bejeweled2 (great game):

I finally bitted the bullet and bought the last 2 remaining books in the rifter’s trilogy by Peter Watts (yes, i know, that’s 4 books in total, but due to some weird stuff with the publisher, the last book had to be split in 2…).

Here is my short review: “AWESOME”

This book has everything a book needs to have (including the usual paper, words and a cover): Action, drama, suspense and the best examples of madmen i’ve seen so far in my life. The villain is great, you will never know who he is until you are very late (part of the suspense), and the best thing of all: he is biologically unable to have a conscience (in the sense of having guilt for doing something wrong). His superpower? he can correlate data from a million sources at a time and kill a hundred to save a million… serving the “Greater Good”.

And on the Good Side? The Meltdown Madonna and Ken Lubin… Ken is one hell of a character, he is even scarier than Jukka Sarasti from Blindsight. He is a psycopath, of the serial killing sort, until he was put under the Guilt Trip and brought to serve the corporate elite of the time by “cleaning” security breaches. He develops his own rules for when to kill people and when not to. He’s strong, yet weak as he begins to find was to circumvent his own rules in order to satisfy his need: leaving loose ends so he can then “clean them”. What happens when you free someone like this from having anything remotely close to a “Consciousness of what is good or bad?”

We monkeys humans are guilt driven individuals. You want someone to do something he doesn’t want to? make him/her feel guilty and watch. Examples? ask any girlfriend you have ever had… or your wife.

What happens if you could modify the chemicals that interact with your brain and make you think that you think you are feeling guilty about something?

That’s what the Guilt Trip does, it sends chemicals into your brain whenever it detects that you are thinking about doing something that would not benefit The Purpose and makes you deviate from that, thus making big decisions like killing some to save many a breeze to take.

— Begin Rant —

Maybe we could inject something like that into the brains of our back-stabing, money-hungry, stupid directing monkeys politicians for a change . Imagine a world where politicians were really there for serving the people, not just themselves and the other people with money. Maybe we could be actually developing new technology or proving important stuff, instead of teaching children that Creationism is some kind of science…

— End Rant —

What happens when you remove the ability to feel guilt? Do all things like moral and ethics go with it?